(500) Days of Summer came out on video yesterday. I watched it last night. I agree with Lindy West, who thought it was a collection of movie clichés run through a malfunctioning editing machine (I’m paraphrasing.) But it also made me think about critics. For the most part, critics don’t tend to vary that much from one another when they’re reviewing a movie. That’s why sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic are enjoyable—you can look at the opposite ends of the critical spectrum on a movie (either end of the spectrum is usually poorly written), but you can also tell that most of the reviews fall into a very narrow valley of appreciation or nonappreciation.

Occasionally, there’ll be a movie like this, though, where people are so polarized that you can’t quite tell what the fuck is going on. Critics I usually like (like Mightygodking) thought it was amazing (He called it “quite simply the best film of the year so far. It is absolutely perfect in any aspect I can think of: intelligent script, ingenious story construction, excellent acting, clever direction, you name it.”) I thought it was a movie about a couple of bratty, ignorant young adults, peppered with clichés from other movies (the musical-sequence-in-an-otherwise non-musical-movie, the lame mockery of foreign films.)

On the other hand, Away We Go, which I loved for its lack of cliché and its fully rounded characters*, was despised by many reviewers (like Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Glieberman) as a “comedy of quirkiness, in which ”eccentric” characters are placed on screen to inspire an amused whatever! shrug — that little ping of superiority we feel when a petty, deluded narcissist is pinned down and wriggling.” You could just as easily have taken those words and applied them to Summer in a review and I would have agreed without thinking twice about it. So maybe there are (500) Days of Summer People and Away We Go People. I am happy to belong to the latter group.

*Say what you like about Zooey Deschanel in Summer, but she did not have a character on-screen. I understand the argument that the movie was from Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character’s point of view, and that he didn’t know her as a person, but guess what? Hollywood puts out movies all the time about dudes who fall in love with women without knowing them as people. There are so many of them that we just call them movies.

20 replies on “On (500) Days of Summer”

  1. C’mon. Joseph Gordon-Leavitt fixing his hair by looking at himself in a car window and seeing Han Solo reflected back at him? That was pretty funny.

  2. I felt conflicted about both movies, but Away We Go is the one that I keep thinking about. 500 Days of Summer was disappointingly by-the-book with some truly terrible performances and a hokey ending. But even so, Joseph Gordon-Levitt managed to charm me enough that I don’t regret seeing it.

    On the other hand, I loved the leads in Away We Go because, as you say, they are well-rounded and self-aware. But for me that made the secondary characters’ flatness all the more jarring. Take Maggie Gyllenhall’s character — I know moms who practice babywearing, family bed, and nursing on demand. And guess what? They have a sense of humor about it. The filmmakers tried to have it both ways, but if you can’t get enough laughs out of your sensitive, real-people comedy, the solution is not to just stick in stereotyped straw men to aim jokes at.

  6. The problem, of course, has less to do with the movie and more to do with the fact that Paul doesn’t just have *no* taste – he has *anti*-taste. Case in point: his one-off this past Monday on “Better Off Ted” claiming that it “became very generic very quickly.”

  9. The quirk about 500 Days is that you (the viewer) saw everything through the guy’s POV — it was like the Sixth Sense. Summer wasn’t fully realized in the movie because we only saw how Tom viewed her. Instead of an omniscient narrator we had only a lonely horny guy narrator.

    People who liked the movie saw this as a feature; those who disliked it saw it as a bug. Except Lindy, who just didn’t like it.

  10. “a collection of movie clichés run through a malfunctioning editing machine “

    For reference, that would be Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  11. Dan Howes almost gets it. Tom sees Summer as the manic pixie dream girl, because that’s who he wants her to be. He cannot cope with the real person she is — the real person who keeps trying to set him straight.

  12. BTW, I thought Away We Go was OK. But I couldn’t relate to any character in it. The closest was the stroller-hating bohemian mom.

  13. I saw them both and liked them both, but I’m a little partial to Away We Go. It felt more emotionally honest time than 500 Days did, maybe because I’m closer to 40 now than I am to 30.

  17. I hated this movie. It was like an emotional cocktease… every time I got ready to cry or have a cathartic moment something so glaringly horrifyingly false would happen and I’d feel like a tool. I saw The Ugly Truth three or four days later and was amazed at how much more well-rounded the characters felt in that.

    Joseph Gordon-Leavitt was freaking adorable though. And I’ve been updating my wardrobe based on his outfits. Totally unbelievable as a “frustrated architect” though. Wouldn’t he be designing greeting cards and not writing them?

    Zooey is the root of all evil. And she doesn’t tip.
    http://probablyawkward.typepad.com/that_…

  18. Part of me felt like a sucker for being so taken in by Away We go and the other part felt bewildered anger at all of the critics who complained that it was condescending and judgemental. Overall, though, it’s probably in the lower reaches of my top whatever number of the year.

    I didn’t love or hate 500 Days of Summer. I did appreciate that if you were paying attention, it was unflinchingly straightforward about just how delusional the Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character was in a way that was pretty different from most Hollywood romcoms. The ending, like much of the rest of the plot, was not particularly believable on several fronts.

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